Anne Hathaway: pimples and eye-rolls

Anne Hathaway is Catwoman. And I really wish these comic book people would make up their minds about when to use one word or two words for the titles of their superheroes.

Batman, Catwoman, Superman...
But Spider-Man has to have a hyphen. And Iron Man is two words completely.

Oh wait, nerds, let me guess. This is a DC vs Marvel thing, isn’t it? What it is is a pain in the ass.

Anyway, to resume, Anne Hathaway is Catwoman, all one word. Promotion for The Dark Knight Rises where she’s concerned, appears to be following the familiar playbook - put her on the cover of a fluffy fashion magazine but give Christian Bale the opportunity to really engage in a proper article with a more serious editorial angle.

Here’s Annie in Allure looking beautiful. She’s getting more and more beautiful. More beautiful now than she was 5 years ago and, no doubt, by the time she’s 35, I can’t even imagine. You’ve seen her in the trailer for Les Miserables, haven’t you? There’s a shot of Annie, under a hood, head turned to the side, her skin all fresh with promise, before cruel life disappointed her to death, and, well, she is breathtaking. No? You don’t remember. OF COURSE I’ll post it again! It’s my favourite thing to do!

As for this interview - I’m delighted with her when she talks about her diet and that Catwoman suit but I’m also throwing her some serious eye-roll at her answer about Knocked Up. Let’s start with what she called a “psychological terrorist” and worrying about getting into leather from head to toe:

"It was a psychological terrorist. The suit, thoughts of my suit, changing my life so I would fit into that suit.... It dominated my year. I didn't understand how you could be thin and strong. I went into the gym for ten months and didn't come out."

Sure, there are a handful of you better than the rest of us who insist you don’t care about what you look like, and don’t worry if you’re standing next to the model in the group photo and how that turns you into the stubby troll in the class. Before you speak at a business meeting, your head is only focused on the content and you don’t bother with the other details - whether or not your blouse is gaping because you’re in that part of your cycle where you’re fuller everywhere and your clothes fit that much tighter; if the back fat is visible; whether or not you can see the line of your pantyhose and where it cuts off the flesh at your waist. You are superior and deserve to be admired.

This is not the experience for some of us though.

And some actors wouldn’t admit to it either. Admit to being preoccupied by their bodies? Admit to fixating on the superficial? Oh they do, certainly. More than most. But they’d never want you to know that. Anne Hathaway just told us though that she was obsessed with it. That she was preoccupied with not looking fat. This is another conversation - what we, what women do, in the pursuit of “not looking fat”. But I can handle this honesty more than the actress who tells me that “I was willing to do whatever it took to become this character, and inhabit her, from the inside out”. F-ck off! You eat celery all day and daydream about fries. Why lie? This is why I’ll always appreciate Julianne Moore who acknowledged a few years ago that not indulging, ever, and existing only on bite sizes, is the requirement. Or, in Annie’s case, hummus and radishes:

"I'm doing some crazy weight stuff right now (for Les Miserables). I'm on day six of detox. This diet makes me break out, so I love that. Nothing like living on hummus and radishes and then be all, 'And I got a pimple. Yeah!'"

She’s likeable here, right?

And then it comes up that she turned down Katherine Heigl’s role in Knocked Up which I am telling you if only we could make a Hollywood Sliding Doors happen, you know?

"I thought about that Judd [Apatow] was right to include the shot (of childbirth). I didn't disagree with the shot. My issue with it was that having not experienced motherhood myself, I didn't know how I was gonna feel on the other side about giving birth. Because giving birth involves another human being, I didn't feel it was fair for me to make that call for myself."

Just like she’s been a consumptive French prostitute who cuts off her hair for money? Or the White Queen in Alice In Wonderland??? Or CATWOMAN????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

See now in real life, that sh-t would come out of her mouth and she’d have friends around to tell her to Sit DOWN. In Hollywood they fall to their knees and gasp at the artistic profundity of it all. And, in this case, what makes it even worse, is that she ends up unintentionally declaring that Heigl was more capable than she was about going there. KATHERINE HEIGL!!! But this is exhausting, isn’t it? Like, you’ve seen Knocked Up, right? I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, but, um, at the same time, we’re not exactly dealing with Death Of A Salesman here. And yet this is Anne Hathaway. It wouldn’t be Annie Hathaway, who grew up in theatre, if she couldn’t dissect every scene with Shakespearean precision. I don’t even know what that means, Shakespearean precision. But she would. This is the point.